Re: Integrating support for GNOME VFS into glibc

[Magnus Bergman <magnus bergman observer net>]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 20:04:12 +0100
Nicholas Allen <nick allen onlinehome de> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I think it would be great if GNOME VFS support could be integrated
into glibc. 
> This would allow existing applications to make use of GNOME VFS
without 
> needing to be modified or even recompiled. Thus in bash I could 'cd 
> http://slashdot.org' for 
> example.
> 
> There are a number of ways of doing this. One would be to obverride
the 
> required libc functions (open, read etc)  and use LD_PRELOAD to
override 
> them. I tried this solution but my overridden functions are never
called for 
> some reason (may be I am doing something wrong?).
> 
> Another approach would be to hack it directly into the glibc source
code and 
> add a configure option for it.
> 
> What do you think of this idea? I suggested this idea to the glibc
maintainers 
> and Richard Stallman thought it would be a good idea to contact this
list as 
> well.
> 
> Anyone like this idea or can anyone see any reasons why it wouldn't be

> feasable.

>From what I understand the problem is this: GNOME VFS (or any other
similar virtual filesystem) can not provide full POSIX compliance since
many protocols simply doesn't support it. So this would break the POSIX
compliance of glibc and most likely a considerable amount of
applications relying on it. Another reason might be that many people
like to keep most of their system (including GNOME VFS and all its
dependencies) on a partition not available on boot-time (often located
on another host). It would be quite inconvenient with all those extra
dependencies even to /sbin/init.